Change in Walking may Signal Dementia
February 6th, 2006 by RespiteMatch.comDoctors have a new tool that may help them predict who will develop a form of dementia later in life. The research from Albert Einstein College of Medicine finds the presence of an abnormal gait in elderly people without dementia predicts the risk of developing dementia. The form of dementia is non-Alzheimer’s dementia.
Gait disorders are increasingly common with advancing age. Between 8 percent and 19 percent of elderly people have this disorder. Doctors speculate a gait disorder may be able to predict dementia, but they have not been completely sure of the connection. They often report patients who have Alzheimer’s have a gait disorder, so they theorized it might be a warning sign. This study looked at the relationship between the two.
Doctors studied 422 people age 75 and older. At the beginning of the study, 85 people had abnormal walking patterns. During the follow-up period, there were 125 newly diagnosed cases of dementia, 70 of them Alzheimer’s and 55 non-Alzheimer’s. The researchers write, “Subjects with neurologic gait abnormalities had a greater risk of development of non-Alzheimer’s dementia.”
They conclude these findings indicate a strong connection between gait disorders and dementia. “If replicated, these findings would provide a strategy for identifying a group at very high risk for vascular dementia and would facilitate the introduction of preventive interventions designed to reduce the incidence of non-Alzheimer’s dementia, especially vascular dementia,” say researchers.
SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine, 2002;347:1761-1768
